At home Marina had never been so close to Alik as she was now. Never before had she needed him so much. After each of her ordeals, he was eager for every detail. When she told him of her session with the head of the hospital, Alik vowed: “If he calls you in one more time, I swear I’ll go talk to him. I’ll make him leave you alone.” Trying to encourage her, he said: “You’re very brave. Remember when you answer them back, I’m with you in spirit every second.”
Marina felt he was proud of her—and he was. Two or three days after their return, he wrote the embassy about the pressures to which she was being subjected. Like a little boy boasting, he concluded: “My wife stood up well, without getting into trouble.”[1]
To his brother Robert, he wrote:
You don’t know what a trial this is…. The Russians can be crude and very crude at times. They gave a cross-examination to my wife on the first day we came back from Moscow, they knew everything because they spy, and read the mails, but we shall continue to try and get out. We shall not retreat…. I hope someday I’ll see you and Vada [Robert’s wife] but if and when I come, I’ll come with my wife. You can’t imagine how wonderfully she stood up.[2]
They had their lighter moments, too. There was a raft of forms to fill out for the authorities in Minsk. Marina had to apply for a Soviet foreign passport, good for travel abroad, and an exit visa. Alik needed only an exit visa, but every form had to be filled out at least in triplicate, each with photographs attached. Alik insisted on doing them all, even hers. He told Marina that she would never get around to doing them herself. But he had great difficulty with the forms because, without knowing it, he suffered from a reading disability called strephosymbolia. The condition, also known as dyslexia or “word blindness,” is caused by what doctors term “mixed lateral dominance of the brain.” A person suffering from this condition is not predominantly left- or right-handed, but for genetic reasons displays the characteristics of both. Thus Alik read not only from left to right but also, part of the time, from right to left, and when he wrote he often reversed letters and punctuation marks. Filling out forms was laborious for him, and Marina recalls that he had to bring five or six blanks home for every form he managed to complete successfully. He was in rollicking good spirits nonetheless.
When they were faced with Marina’s biggest ordeal, a full-scale meeting of the Komsomol aktiv of the hospital, Alik wanted to go with her. “You don’t need to,” Marina said. “In fact, you can’t. You’re not a member.”
He tried to support her anyhow. “I won’t let them hurt my little girl.” He took her in his arms. “I want you to show you’re your own person. You’ve a right to go abroad if you want. It’s they who are wrong to meddle. I’ll be thinking about you the whole time. Maybe that’ll help.”
The chairman of the meeting was a leader of the citywide Komsomol organization. Representatives of every department of the hospital appeared as witnesses, as did two girls from the pharmacy. Looking very solemn, they were seated around a long table draped in red, with a red flag furled to one side and an attentive-looking portrait of Lenin peering down from the wall. Only Marina was standing, her pregnancy not yet apparent.
She was not intimidated by their questions. The Komsomol had not cared about her in the least, she said, until she went to the American embassy. She knew she was being rude, but she was bitterly offended by their questions. She had done nothing to harm others. This was her private life, and she hated having it raked over the coals. When one of the members suggested that her husband might be a spy, she quickly found her reply: “So my husband was right after all. He said you people think there’s a spy under every pillow. Actually what he does every night is tap out messages in Morse code about how the Komsomol is trying to brainwash me.”
The chairman told her that the Komsomol knew everything about her and her husband, “We knew each time you had a date. We knew when you applied for your marriage license. We knew the date of your wedding,” he said. Marina was chilled but not surprised. She had long been aware that the Komsomol was a tool of the police. Its members were often assigned to report on the activities of their friends.
Finally, the chairman again warned that her husband might be a spy. “You’re young,” he said. “We wouldn’t expect you to find out right away. One doesn’t wake up to such horrible things overnight.” Marina refused to believe it. “So I don’t know my husband well yet,” she said. “But one thing I can assure you. He’s not an American spy. On that score you can set your minds at rest.”
When the meeting ended she was told that another meeting would be called with representatives from every hospital in Minsk to decide whether to expel her from the Komsomol.
“Go ahead and expel me if you like,” Marina said. “But don’t expect me to come to the meeting. I’ve told you everything I know.”
Out on the street afterward, the chairman drew Marina aside and warned her that she had behaved so egregiously it might now be necessary to make a public example of her. Marina knew a threat when she heard one—a full-scale attack in the press.
Alik was waiting anxiously at home. Had they “tormented” her long? he wanted to know. The meeting lasted two hours, she told him. “They said you were a spy,” she said with a weary smile.
“I expected it,” he answered. “That’s what Ella’s family thought.”
A week or so later, the girls at the pharmacy went off to the meeting on Marina’s case. She waited behind at work. She expected the news they brought: “You were expelled today.” She took it with a touch of bravado. “Fine! Now I’ll have money for the movies.”
Alik’s response echoed her own. “Fine! Now you won’t have to go to the meetings.” The few times Marina had gone to them, he accused her of using them as a pretext to slip out with old boyfriends.
Her expulsion was, in reality, a blow to Marina, as if the Komsomol were a mother who had pushed her out in anger. Her world was collapsing beneath her. It was the sort of thing that often happens to a girl before she marries a foreigner, not after. Marina had been spared before her marriage because everyone, even the Komsomol, assumed Alik was a Soviet citizen and could not go back to America even if he wanted to. Few people had seriously supposed that Marina was marrying Alik for a foreign passport. Now the accusation was heard often. “You ought to have married Anatoly,” Marina’s best friend at the pharmacy said. Then she added: “Forget it, Marina. You’ll never be allowed to go.”
The official pressure, as it happened, was over. But Marina had yet to endure other, personal pressures. Her most painful rebuff came from Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya. On Sunday, a few days after their return from Moscow, Alik went off to visit the Prusakovs. In a matter of minutes he was home again. Valya had answered the bell and said, “I’m sorry, Alik, we don’t want to see you any more.” Valya, the warm, approving Valya, had shut the door in his face.